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The Guardian - UK
The Guardian - UK
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Rafael Behr

Nigel Farage thinks net zero is the new Brexit. Starmer can prove him wrong

Keir Starmer with wind turbines in the background
Keir Starmer on a visit to an on-shore wind farm near Grimsby, Lincolnshire, 10 November, 2022. Photograph: PA Images/Alamy

Which former British prime minister described the climate emergency as “a clock ticking to the furious rhythm of hundreds of billions of pistons and turbines and furnaces and engines … quilting the Earth in an invisible and suffocating blanket of CO2”?

The florid style gives it away. You’d guess Boris Johnson even if you’d forgotten that the master of Brexit bombast also had a sideline in net zero evangelism. It wasn’t the most memorable part of his repertoire and it didn’t catch on as a Conservative catechism.

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